“... or when Lady Layard translated a treatise on lace-making and her husband, Sir Austen Henry Layard, helped to establish a collection of historic Venetian glass on Murano; and above all when John Charles Robinson bought ceramics, metalwork, glass and textiles from Venice for South Kensington, the ‘products of the artisan’ were receiving plenty ...”

“... ends with a parody, an affectionate rewrite of Sir Gawain called ‘The Seventh Knight and the Green Cat’, which closes with a volte-face. Whatever Mr Brownjohn has to say he says ‘truthfully’: it is hard to think of many writers at once so lacking in blague and yet so unboring. In substance, many of these poems come close to the ...”

“... ladies and foreigners with long hair, and educated Englishmen did not sing’. Sir William Henry Hadow, a leading educational reformer after the First World War, remembered the schooling he had received in the 1870s by noting that music had beenthe reluctant substitute for cricket, all the more bitter because it carried the suspicion of an unmanly ...”

“... d’esprit, ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came’, he was playing with the same idea which Henry James would explore elaborately in his story ‘The Beast in the Jungle’. In both cases a narrator awaits, hopes and seeks for the arrival of the true thing, the Big Experience. And the awareness of looking is itself the indication that it will not be ...”

“... biography had to be written so that we, unlike the benighted Victorian, can thoroughly understand Henry Esmond. This mission to unlock the text is what sanctions – ostensibly – the vast expenditure of 20th-century biographical energy and treasure on such issues as Dickens and Ellen Ternan, Hardy and Tryphena Sparks, Trollope and Kate Field, James and his ...”

“... Melba in a Paris street and asked her for money, she gave him what she had in her purse. But Henry James’s friend Morton Fullerton made a more typical response – he must have written this letter with Shakespeare’s play open on his desk: I am distressed to have left your touching appeal unanswered for so long. But I have been on congé in the ...”

“... a lasting inspiration for the authentically progressive – whoever you consider those to be, from Henry Moore to Gilbert and George – in an English art world that remained through the 20th century recalcitrantly retardataire, forever harking back to Victorian escapism and prettiness. On the contrary, goes the other voice, genuine innovation in England was ...”

“... sounds like the title of a novel, and the book isn’t without its literary qualities. Parsing Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, Feeney notes that he ‘presents himself as a sort of Germanic Jeeves, unflappable and long-suffering, who again and again saves the day for his maladroit employer, a malevolent, egregiously Middle American Bertie ...”

“... of Rye, the cobbled and gabled ‘Tinkerbell Towne’, as Burra dubbed it, where memories of Henry James and Stephen Crane were fresh and sightings of Radclyffe Hall and her friend Una, Lady Troubridge, lent a touch of verisimilitude to the farcical Rye that, passed off as ‘Tilling’, was the abode of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia and ‘Quaint ...”

“... was variation in colour. Chemical compounds containing strontium burn red; copper carbonate adds green; iron filings make showers of golden sparkles.China’s appetite for novelty also led to chains of multiple ignitions and wooden dragons spitting fire. The 16th-century scholar Feng Ying Ching wrote about a kind of bomb from which sprang ground rats and ...”

“... In 1905, Lord Curzon split the province in two: his sole object, in the view of the Liberal MP Henry Cotton, was ‘to shatter the unity and to disintegrate the feelings of solidarity which are established’ there. The decision was so unpopular, and so helpful to agitators, that the partition was reversed in 1911. (George V made the announcement ...”

“... a medium spoke in the presence of Mrs William James of a communication from a ‘Mary’ to Henry, the message was dutifully passed on to Henry James in England, who wrote that it was his ‘dear Mother’s unextinguished consciousness breaking through the interposing vastness of the universe and pouncing upon the ...”

“... on Whitman, including opera and painting, and about the influence of Whitman on others, including Henry James – who read Whitman, he told Edith Wharton, in ‘a mood of subdued ecstasy’ – and Hopkins, who wrote: ‘I always knew in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any man living.’ ‘Hopkins must have been ...”

“... Bryan Carsberg of Oftel smiles up in soft brown light as he dangles in the mirror on a green office wall. Michael Meyer of Emess Lighting is dissected by the blinds that cut across him and then reassembled from outside – his shirtsleeved figure looming like a target in the formulaic eye of some Hollywood assassin ...”

“... siphoned off to finance ‘security’. That audit reports were commissioned at all owes a lot to Henry Waxman, a Democrat and ranking minority member of the House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform. Waxman voted in favour of the invasion of Iraq. But since the war he’s been demanding that the Bush administration account for its cost. Within ...”